I decided that this past weekend I was going to get the PiRLP project going. The picture above is the benched, but working result. The black box on the left is the Raspberry Pi. The circuit board in the middle is the IRLP interface board. And the various jumper cables are connections going to my Arcom RC210 repeater controller. I’ve since cleaned up the install and made some of the connections permanent as I’m mounting it to a rack shelf.
The initial install of IRLP and EchoIRLP went fairly well. However I discovered that at some point in the EchoIRLP install, my tbd.conf file was overwritten as a zero-byte file, which prevented the Echolink portion from working. Upon each launch the software would complain about missing directives from the file. It took four starts via /home/irlp/custom/rc.irlp in order to get a working file.
I also discovered a number of issues with files being in the wrong location or named with the wrong case. Each situation was fixed with a symlink, but still a bit of a pain to have to track down.
As of now, both NF9K repeaters (70cm and 33cm) are linked to the K3HTK 33cm repeater in Noblesville, IN. I’m still observing behavior and tracking down causes of oddities, but it is running. I’m quite happy to be on the brink of putting the old XP laptop and the AMI2 interface to pasture.
